Corporeal Legacies in the US South

Memory and Embodiment in Contemporary Culture

Christopher Lloyd

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN:
  9783319962054
• Print ISBN:
  9783319962047
• Subtopic: Film & Video

© The Author(s) 2018

Christopher LloydCorporeal Legacies in the US Southhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96205-4_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: The Body of/in Memory

Christopher Lloyd¹

(1)

School of Humanities, University of Hertfordshire, Hatfield, Hertfordshire, UK

Christopher Lloyd

Keywords

US SouthMemoryBlack studiesBeyoncéEmbodimentPosthumanismSouthern studiesMemory studies

End Abstract

Lemonade

In April 2016, Beyoncé released Lemonade , a visual album that foregrounds and celebrates the black female body, especially as it is lived in the US South. Building on the February 2016 release of her song “Formation ,” Lemonade is as “southern” as Beyoncé has ever been: the album luxuriates in images, signs, and textures from the region. From slave cabins to woodland clearings, parlor rooms to front porches, New Orleans second lines to dining rooms, coastal swampland to neon-lit car parks, antebellum forts to cane fields, black women saturate the spaces and environments of the US South, crossing temporal and imaginative lines. The profusion of southern settings and musicality—along with the intersectional feminism that is entangled in these backdrops—is rooted, quite clearly, in the black body. Even if we agree, as Tara McPherson writes, that “The South is as much a fiction, a story we tell and are told, as it is a fixed geographic space,” the stories and narratives that Lemonade spins are manifold and rooted in the particular experiences of black lives and black bodies.¹ Indeed, in layering film, song, and poetry—written by British-Somali poet Warsan Shire—Beyoncé has conjured less a southern simulation than what Thadious Davis calls a “southscape ”: an entangling of “space, race, and society in the Deep South,” a list to which I would add bodies.²

I begin with a discussion of Lemonade because it frames so clearly the concerns of Corporeal Legacies in the US South: Memory and Embodiment in Contemporary Culture. This book examines the ways in which historical injuries and injustices done to black lives in the US South—and the United States more broadly—are made manifest in representations of embodiment in contemporary culture set in the region. If Beyoncé’s recent music, in the worlds of Zandria F. Robinson, has “the volume on the South ratcheted up to the lower frequencies,” then it is the project of this book to track those frequencies as they play out in contemporary literature, television, and film, by Jesmyn Ward, Kathryn Stockett, Benh Zeitlin, and others.³ This introductory chapter will contextualize and outline the book by laying out (after an analysis of Lemonade ) its key terms: Bodies , South, Memory, “Human,” “Animal ,” and finally “Formation .”⁴

Lemonade begins with the song “Pray You Catch Me,”⁵ where we see Beyoncé in a cane field, on stage, and at Fort Macomb, a nineteenth-century structure just outside of New Orleans .⁶ This song, with its layered soundscape and sly gospel chords, sets up the remainder of the album’s interest in “black Southern regionalism” that, Robinson argues, also “writes black women back into national, regional and diasporic histories by making them the progenitors and rightful inheritors of the Southern gothic tradition.”⁷ The song is followed by the segment “Intuition,” where we see, in black and white, black women on a porch in big white dresses, slave cabins, a forest, and trees draped in Spanish moss. In evoking the antebellum period through the signifiers of the plantation, as well as the lack of color, the film layers and enfolds temporality: this is a South both in and out of time. Black women are not enchained or working the fields; they recline and sit and perch and move. We hear one of Shire’s works here, and a key line sums up the scope of Lemonade and the thematic of this book: “the past and the future merge to meet us here. What luck. What a fucking curse.”⁸ Beyoncé’s southscape immerses us in this temporal bayou: dense and muggy, but rich with imaginative potential. The album’s narrative moves from the singer’s feelings of being cheated on, through to anger and revenge, and on to forgiveness and reconciliation. Yet if this personal story appears merely self-absorbed, Robinson reminds us: “Like much work that has emerged in the age of Black Lives Matter, we are to read the literal relationship turmoil as a metaphor for black women’s relationship to modern systems of oppression.”⁹ As ever, the personal is political.

That Beyoncé’s southscape is centered on black women is Lemonade’s strength. Standing outside slave cabins or in car parks, or—in an explicit nod to Julie Dash’s glorious Daughters of the Dust (1993)—gliding through coastal swampland, Beyoncé is surrounded by black women . Among the many women of color in the film, we see Sabrina Fulton, Gwen Carr, and Lezley McSpadden, all of whom hold pictures of their deceased sons: Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, and Michael Brown, respectively. But there are also family members (Blue Ivy, Tina Knowles), musicians (Chloe x Halle), actresses (Quvenzhané Wallis), athletes (Serena Williams), and others.¹⁰ The film features an audio quotation from Malcolm X’s 1962 “Who Taught You to Hate Yourself” speech—”the most disrespected person in America is the black woman”—which is then followed by portraits of black women , on the street or at home. As such, Lemonade might be contextualized by the black feminist theorizing so central to the articulation of civil and human rights. The album embodies what Patricia Hill Collins describes in Black Feminist Thought (1990): that “the convergence of race, class, and gender oppression characteristic of U.S. slavery shaped all subsequent relationships that women of African descent had within Black American families and communities, with employers, and among one another.”¹¹ Collins pinpoints the legacies of slavery that inform, shape, and organize contemporary black social life, especially as it is felt by women. And while female bodies are not the only ones examined in this book, the sense in which corporeality is racialized, and that racialization brings with it the histories and memories of slavery and its aftermath, is central to the proceeding chapters.

Exemplary of this book, Lemonade is vitally concerned with the body—across the songs, images, and poetry of the album, we witness bodies in ecstasy, in anger, in sadness, and in stoicism; we hear about “thickened skin” on feet, of menstrual blood, cracked hips, and abstention from sex; we hear of Beyoncé’s anger at her cheating husband, asking, about this lover, if “it’s what you truly want, I can wear her skin over mine”; we see women in tribal body paint , holding hands, naked in fields, wading through water; we hear about blood, the uterus, zinc, the “deep velvet” of mothers, and about “Grief sedated by orgasm [and] orgasm heightened by grief”; there are fingers wrapped in Band-Aids, and women putting on makeup; there are cuticles, palms, scars, sutures, stitches, chains, and wounds; and, above all, there are groups of black women together. The textures, sounds, affects, feelings, thoughts, limits, and changes of the black body are central to the political and aesthetic work of Beyoncé’s album. Indeed, if we were to triangulate Lemonade with two other albums from her family—Solange’s A Seat at the Table (2016) and Jay-Z’s 4:44 (2017)—we see an even broader story of black bodies and identities in the twenty-first century, played out in popular culture. It is the aim of this book to follow other cultural examples that extend, complicate, and underline the corporeal and imaginative work of these records.

In all, Robinson writes, “Lemonade is a womanist sonic mediation that spans from the spiritual to trap, with stops at country soul and rock & roll in between. Its visual language is packed tightly with a consistent iconography of black Southern women’s history and movement through the rural and urban Souths of the past and present.” The album is, she goes on, “Beyoncé’s intimate look into the multigenerational making and magic of black womanhood” that also “returns again and again to Louisiana plantation spaces.”¹² Though some might suggest that this album is just surface, a circulation of images and simulations to sell records and products, I would contend that it can be these things as well as politically and culturally transformative...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction: The Body of/in Memory
• 2. The Plantation to the Penitentiary: Monster’s Ball and Bodies at Their Limits
• 3. The Plantation to the Apocalypse: Zombies and the Non/Human in The Walking Dead and A Questionable Shape
• 4. The Home of Jim Crow: Toilets and Matter in Kathryn Stockett’s The Help
• 5. “Everything Deserve to Live”: Salvage the Bones, Hurricane Katrina, and Animals
• 6. “Fabric of the Universe Is Comin’ Unraveled”: Beasts of the Southern Wild, from Flesh to Planet
• 7. Conclusion: Corporealizing Southern Studies
• Back Matter